Oysterhead: New Order.

The Grand Pecking Order is in stores now.

“A supergroup? Absolutely super!” laughs Stewart Copeland, putting on his best cockney accent. “Well technically a supergroup is when you have people who are known for other things joined together for a new thing, so I suppose Oysterhead would qualify. Also, the other definition is un-earned audience… I just made that up. It’s fresh. Most of what I tell you won’t be fresh, because I’ve been asked so many things, but that’s a new one.”

We’re talking, as you may have guessed, Oysterhead. Aside from the aforementioned Stewart Copeland, formerly of The Police and now Hollywood soundtrack composer, Oysterhead consists of Les Claypool of mental funksters Primus and Trey Anastasio of jam driven musical monsters Phish. Hence the supergroup tag.

Anyway, they’ve thrown together an album entitled The Grand Pecking Order. As is to be expected from such a distinguished cast of characters, it’s a musical treat verging on the lyrically insane. Certainly one of the years must hear experiences.

“It started off as a one off show, but we enjoyed it so much that we did an album that we enjoyed so much we did a tour. We enjoyed that so much we thought, shit, we should write another album so we’ve got more material to play. We ran through out thirteen songs, and Trey comes from a musical tradition that requires playing four-hour sets and playing different songs from one night to the next. We gotta get more material together.

The one off show was held in New Orleans late last year.

“I met Les because Primus asked me to produce a track for them, so I got me a bunch of records, and though, fuck, theses guys can play, I wonder if anyone else in the band can sing… I actually became very enamoured with Les’ singing style. It takes a while to get it, but I love it now. He called m up and said I got a guitarist, the guy from Phish, and we met up in Vermont and jammed.”

“When I got there I realised that each member of Phish owns a county of Vermont. That was my first inkling. I went to his jam room, and it’s a huge barn on his 200-acre estate or something… We jammed all afternoon, and I though these are a couple of amusing guys to hang out with, then I went home. It’s quite rare now that I play drums, or jam with people. I’m a composer now, I write music and hire some other drummer to play it and deal with Armani clad Paramount executives. That’s my life. To go out and jam was a lot of fun.”

“We got together for the show with the jams as a starting point. Les and Trey came up with some lyrics and went out with maybe twenty minutes of material and stretched it out for two hours. It drove me nuts. I was completely mortified by that, because it just contravenes all the rules of stagecraft, but Trey said, this is my audience.”

The hype and anticipation surrounding the new project was immediately apparent from the moment the initial New Orleans show went on sale.

“The tickets sold out in twelve minutes. I was vaguely aware the tickets were going to go on sale, and I didn’t think anything more of it. I knew these were not my fans. They’re busy getting their kids to school; they’re not hovering over a computer. 2800 seats, with 2800 people sitting on their computers waiting for the tickets to go on sale. Fuck, someone in this group has a following, and it turned out to be Trey. Les too, but his fans didn’t have a chance, you know.”

That’s because the Phish fans are computer nerds, but the Primus fans would have been queuing at the door…

“That’s true,” he laughs. “In fact, that’s very astute of you… But a few days later on E-bay a friend pointed me to where Oysterhead tickets were being scalped for $2000. I though to myself, those are my fans… You know, they’re all in the mid thirties; they’re running the place now. Those snotty nosed little kids I used to play to back in the eighties are running the place.”

“In fact some of those snotty nosed kids back in the day were Les and Trey, so I get such respect from my band mates. Totally alien to my from my Police days. I though playing in a band was a war zone. It was always about survival. I forgot what it was like in the early days when we were actually friends. Well, we’re again friends now. But being on stage every night and getting in the van and the people you want to hang out with are your band buddies, that’s new for me.”